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But in Greece if we could fancy ourselves there, shorn of our little local personalities in some classic grove, on sunlit slopes, all bubbling with the re-birth of flowers and alive with the light, the broad all-flooding light of Greece that her children dreaded to leave more than any other earthly thing, when death threatened could one not imagine the loveliness of some garlanded dance, and fancy the naïads, and the dryads, and all the hosts of Pan gambolling at one's heels?"
The stranger was well built and of distinguished appearance. The journalist suppressed a start of amazement. "Why, it's not surprising that you have not heard of them, they are quite unimportant. On the Place de la Concorde there are two bronze monuments representing Naiads emerging from the fountains. You probably have seen them yourself?"
He did not complete his thought. After once more making sure that nobody was about, and that the excellent Wulf was still absorbed in contemplation of the Seine, he climbed into the basin at the foot of one of the bronze naiads and waded through mud and water to the base of the statue. "Now, then, let's see, what must I do next?
Streaked and wrinkled by a mysterious motion of its own, it affects the very type of a legendary pool, and I could easily have believed that I had only to sit long enough into the evening to see the ghosts of classic nymphs and naiads cleave its sullen flood and beckon me with irresistible arms.
The mariners, not willing to awake him, landed him softly, and laid him in a cave at the foot of an olive-tree, which made a shady recess in that narrow harbour, the haunt of almost none but the sea-nymphs, which are called Naiads; few ships before this Phaeacian vessel having put into that haven, by reason of the difficulty and narrowness of the entrance.
One incident I remember: Catherine treacherously emptying her glass into her lover's neck, between the nape and the collar of his coat; and M. d'Anquetil retorting by pouring the contents of two or three bottles over the girl. Wearing nothing beyond her chemise, it changed Catherine into a kind of mythological figure of a humid species like nymphs and naiads.
They were seated in a luxurious little room, lighted from the peristyle, its adornments in sculpture a sleeping Hermaphrodite and a drunken satyr; on the wall were certain marble low-reliefs, that behind Heliodora representing Hylas drawn down by the Naiads. 'Speak without fear, she reassured him. 'In this house, believe me, no one dare play the eavesdropper.
He had, as prologue to its elucidation, conducted the Baroness into the summer-house that his grandfather, good Duke Augustus, erected in the Gardens of Breschau, close to the Fountain of the Naiads, and had en tete-a-tete explained his notion.
If you found a little schoolboy on his half-holiday fishing for minnows with a crooked pin, and you began to tell him of all the wonders of the deep, the laws of the tides, and the antediluvian relies of iguanodon and ichthyosaurus; nay, if you spoke but of pearl fisheries and coral-banks, or water-kelpies and naiads, would not the little boy cry out peevishly, 'Don't tease me with all that nonsense; let me fish in peace for my minnows! I think the little boy is right after his own way: it was to fish for minnows that he came out, poor child, not to hear about iguanodons and water-kelpies.
The marquise grew as pale as ashes, and the sharp glance of her black eyes was turned quickly upon the countenance of the king, who, instead of looking at her, was staring out of the window at the marble Naiads, over whose white limbs the waters of a fountain were foaming and plashing, in myriads of pearly drops.
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